Dead Mann Running (9781101596494)

by Petrucha, Stefan

  “You’re strapped for cash, aren’t you? With the chak-camps scooping everyone up, you’ve been losing money and influence. Now you think you can get it back with whatever’s in the vials. If it works, you keep it. If it doesn’t you sell it back to ChemBet.”

  He threw his hands up in the air. “I tried the nice way…”

  CLUNK!

  Colby Green went forward, he forehead-smashed the plate in front of him, cracking the expensive china right down the middle.

  Nell stood behind him, holding the small marble pedestal she’d grabbed from the mantel. One white edge marred with a bit of blood.

  She turned her green eyes on me. “He’s got some new drug he thinks will prevent a chak from going feral temporarily. If you didn’t cooperate, he was going to shoot you full of it and cut you up into little pieces until you talked. I want to get out of here. You wanna help or what?”

  26

  Unlike whatever made me and Booth ankle buddies, Nell’s chain was for show. I was going to snap it off, but she stopped me, stuck her hand in the pocket of Green’s robe, and pulled out the key.

  Before she could use it, he moaned. A welt was growing on the back of his head, but even so, he had a way of moaning that made unconsciousness seem dirty. The collar unlocked, she pulled it off and tossed it at his groin, like she was hoping it would do some damage.

  Then we stood there a second, face-to-face in the quiet.

  “So, you gonna kiss me again?” she asked.

  “You want me to?”

  “I…don’t know. Yeah.”

  We gave it a go. It was a little longer than last time, she making more of an effort. Prepubescent kids press lips sometimes to see what all the fuss is about. This wasn’t exactly like that, but it didn’t feel the way it did when I was alive, either. There was a lot less moisture. I wouldn’t say it felt bad. I liked the sense of approval, and something else stirred…

  …until Colby Green moaned again, long and low. His eyes were open. I was afraid he was enjoying watching us, but the pupils were vacant. Still, it ruined the moment.

  I pulled back from Nell. “What’s the best way out of here?”

  “Didn’t work out that part,” she said. “Kitchen leads to the basement, from there we can get to the garage.”

  “How much security, you think?”

  She gave me a little smile. “You were right. I don’t know the details, but he’s been cutting back on expenses. Between here and the garage there may be five at most.”

  “Better than fifty, but we’ll still need some insurance in case we run into them.” I pulled a groggy Green to standing. “Do you know where any weapons are? A knife? Something we can threaten their paycheck with?”

  She pulled open a drawer and pulled out a Walther P99, one of the few guns I can fire without risking my hand. “This do?”

  “Geez, marry me. Point it at him.”

  “No, you take it,” she said, shoving it in my pocket. “I’m afraid I’ll shoot him for the hell of it.”

  I eyed her hand in my pocket. “I appreciate the attention, but you either have to hold the gun or Green.”

  She pulled it back out. Before I could ask if she knew how to use it, she had the safety off. “Fine.”

  Holding his arms behind his back, I aimed Green at the door. His head lolled. I don’t know how aware he was, but somewhere in that overheated head, a very smart, very angry man was fighting his way back to consciousness. I wanted to be far away when he won.

  The kitchen staff backed off at the sight of Nell’s Walther. A maid in a skimpy outfit even held the basement door for us. The stairs were tricky. A quarter of the way down, I lost my grip and Green skittered down to the poured-concrete floor. I was surprised that didn’t snap him out of it. When we yanked him to his feet, he was still disoriented.

  The basement was a cinder-block labyrinth, but Nell knew the way. The only thing I recognized was the open door to the chak pens. Last time I was here it was standing room only. Now, they were empty. A sign of the times.

  Green rustled and opened his eyes. I motioned for Nell to aim the gun at him, but he took one look at her and started sobbing. Tears rolled down his cheeks. Thin mucus poured from his nose.

  “Nell…Nell…Nell…” he said.

  “Now you feel guilty, you son of a bitch?” Nell said.

  I grabbed his hair and pulled his head back. His eyes rolled in the sockets.

  “It might not be his conscience talking. You whacked him pretty good. I think the bawling is a symptom of concussion. Inappropriate emotion.”

  She sneered. “You can’t get more inappropriate than tears from Colby Green. He gonna die?”

  “How the hell should I know? How much farther to the garage?”

  “Down that way and to the left.”

  I expected some guards in the carport, but the only one there was my chubby limo driver. When we came in, he was balanced in a chair, sitting in the middle of six stylish rides. Coat open and flopping along his sides, he was reading his e-book again.

  Seeing us, he bolted up and reached for his own gun. Then he saw the one Nell had aimed at his gut.

  “I don’t see how I could miss you, Tony,” she said. “Put it down.”

  Green’s head steadied. When his eyes took in the fat man as he laid his gun on the floor, he cackled like the Crypt Keeper, only in a much deeper voice.

  “Did you drug him?” Tony asked.

  “No,” I said. “He’s just happy to see you.”

  I pushed him toward the befuddled driver. While he collapsed into the man’s arms, I scooped the gun off the ground.

  Nell grabbed a set of keys from a Peg-Board and pressed the button. The lights on a Tesla Roadster Sport flashed and the door locks clicked open. As Nell and I climbed into the car, Green’s laughter grew frantic. It was like he’d forgotten how to use words and was trying to order his man around with laughs.

  I shot Tony a look. “If you want to keep your boss alive, call him an ambulance.”

  “Okay, he’s an ambulance.”

  Everyone’s a comedian.

  A minute later, we were speeding away on the tree-lined road that brought me here. Much as I admired Nell’s ecologically minded choice, I worried that the Tesla’s battery-powered electric motor would max out around sixty, making it easy for a gas-guzzler to catch up. But we were doing ninety, and the needle kept climbing.

  No one seemed to be following, but that would be a first. Couldn’t do much about what I couldn’t see, so when the curves in the road started stressing my system, I took it down to sixty.

  All in all I thought the meeting with Green had gone pretty well. At least now I didn’t have to worry about what he might do to Nell if I didn’t fork over the vials.

  I looked at her, her black hair mussed, her green chak-eyes focused on the road, maybe worried I’d hit something. She looked better than she did on TV.

  “You swing a mean marble bust.”

  “Thanks. It’s how they thought I killed my husband, Mitch, but I only knocked him out, too.”

  That’s right. She’d been executed like me, ripped when they figured out the evidence wasn’t as conclusive as they thought. We had a lot in common.

  “Ever feel bad about it? Your husband, I mean.”

  She shrugged. “Sometimes I’m sorry I’m not the one who killed him, if that’s what you mean.”

  Wouldn’t say I was disappointed to hear that, just surprised. Hell, I felt bad about Flat-face, and we weren’t even married.

  “What about Green? Why’d you clonk him?”

  “I didn’t have a gun. What is this, a therapy session? Green’s a thousand times worse than Mitch. He didn’t beat me, but he made me…” her voice trailed off. “I told you he was going to cut you up, isn’t that enough?”

  “Yeah, more than enough, and I owe you for that. Believe me, I know how sometimes it’s as hard to do the right thing as it is to figure out what it is.”

  She grit her teeth and
looked around uncomfortably. “You’re as crazy as he is.”

  “Then why are you with me?”

  She bit a polished white nail and spit out the torn bit. “I figure it’s safer to be with the crazy guy who thinks there’s a right thing to do. I didn’t think there’d be this many questions.”

  Speaking of the right thing to do, I pulled over.

  “What’re you doing?” Nell said. She looked behind us to check for other cars.

  “Paying back the favor. There’s a train station an eighth of a mile ahead. A lot of people will be coming after me because of those vials. It’s not safe. You’re better off on your own.”

  She slapped me across the face, hard. “Stupid dick, think you’re hot shit? Did you forget my show? My face has been all over the country every night, and I just gave Colby Green a concussion. You’re the one who should be worried about being with me. And if we were splitting up, I’d keep the Tesla.”

  I rubbed my cheek, though most of what she’d hurt had been my feelings. “I take your point. So what do we do now?”

  “Just…keep going north,” she said. “Until we’re out of the country.”

  “They have chak-camps in Canada, too.”

  “Yeah, but in the northwest they run them more like wilderness refuges, no guards except on the borders. You want to come out, you take a test, and get a pass for a week. Otherwise they leave you alone. The smart ones are trying to build like a society up there.”

  “How do you know all that?”

  “I’m in broadcasting, surrounded by liveblood reporters. I read e-mails I’m not supposed to. I keep my mouth shut and listen when they get drunk. We don’t cover it because our government doesn’t want people pressuring them to follow suit and the Canadians don’t want a rush of corpses heading north.”

  She put her hand on my leg and said, “So, dead Mann, there is someplace we could go. How about it?”

  I was thinking it over when the next curve put us in a small town, no more than a post office and a strip mall. The soundproofing in the Roadster was so good I didn’t hear the gunfire until we were on top of the scene.

  Six armed livebloods stood outside a pharmacy, two wore khaki guard outfits, one had a flamethrower. A dark-skinned, sweaty man, bald up top, but with hair on the sides, was screaming and trying to yank the flamethrower out of the guardsman’s hands.

  Lit with the greenish tint of fluorescents, about the same number of chakz were inside the store. They were trying to hold off the LBs, and so far, they were doing it. I wouldn’t say they were a well-oiled team, but they were sort of organized. Of course the big thing in their favor was the sweaty guy who wouldn’t let go of the flamethrower. Most likely it was his store and he didn’t want to see it go up in flames.

  I slowed down. Nell, watching too, didn’t object. A weird expression came over her face.

  “Is that a sign they’re putting up?” she said.

  I thought she meant the LBs, but three of the chakz were holding up a big banner as a third struggled with a roll of duct tape, trying to paste it to the front window. In a barely legible scrawl, it said:

  FREE CHAKZ

  I didn’t think it meant they were giving themselves away. It reminded me of the march at the mall, but it wasn’t like the old days. The middle-level chakz had been weeded out by the tests. Sure that left a lot of goners around, but it also left the crème de la crème, too, chakz smarter than Jonesey who kept passing the tests, some of whom probably even remembered what it was like to be alive.

  Maybe Jonesey was still on the roof of the lab, organizing this with his cell phone, or maybe not even a chak believed the pictures of Hudson were a hoax. It looked like the rebellion wasn’t over yet.

  Good as the Canadian refuge sounded, Misty was still out there somewhere, Booth was under arrest, and our part of the world was burning.

  Nell watched the scene, shaking her head. “You know that’s not getting any press coverage.”

  Press coverage. The photo was out. ChemBet also didn’t want anyone to know about the vials. What if everyone did? Hard to believe, but I was actually thinking of taking a cue from Jonesey.

  “Nell, the studio you broadcast from, where is it?”

  She answered with a worried look. “Thirty Centre, overlooking the plaza, why?”

  “Because you’re the chak with the knack.”

  I spun the car around and headed for Fort Hammer.

  27

  I’d either had an idea, or my brain had split into chunks. If it was an idea, it went like this: Nell gets in front of a camera and explains the rotting, dirty truth: ChemBet’s lab experimenting on LBs and chakz in a way that’d make Mengele proud, their security forces murdering police officers, the lost blue vials, Colby Green angling to steal them, resulting in the death of a police officer and the false arrest of the head of homicide, the investigation stifled by no less than Mayor Kagan.

  I didn’t even think we’d need proof. After all, it was television. Once the data-starved twenty-four-hour news cycle picked up on it, the whole country would go berserk. I’d hand the vials to the station with the most viewers or the Web site with the most hits, and let them worry about it. There’d be mass protests. It’d be the sixties all over again, only with zombies and better drugs. Those hippies did stop that war, didn’t they? I never remember how that worked out. The trick was making it happen.

  “Fuck,” Nell said, after I gave her the short version. “Just fuck. I’m a stripper, for Christ’s sake. All I do is read off a teleprompter.”

  “People pay attention to strippers.”

  “Not to what they say.”

  I gave her a smile. “You weren’t always a stripper. You were a women’s rights advocate. You must have given a speech or two. Remember any of that?”

  She rolled her head and blew some air through her nostrils. “Shit, I thought hanging with you’d be safer.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you again. We do have two things on our side: Near as I can tell, Maruta has no idea where we are, and with any luck, Green’s still in la-la land.”

  I had her attention. “And once this gets out, that’d be the end of him, pretty much?”

  “And Maruta. Not sure about ChemBet.”

  “If I do this stupid thing, then can we go to Canada?”

  I nodded. “You drink, I’ll drive.”

  She let out a long sigh. “Maybe it’ll make up for past sins.”

  Assuming she was referring to things Green had made her do in his pleasure dome, I decided not to ask for details.

  A lot had happened since I passed through the city an hour ago. Fort Hammer’s silhouette was never much to look at, more a feeble Christmas tree than the stars at night, but even from a distance we could see it was much darker than usual. Most of the office buildings were down to emergency lights. There was no reason the guard would cut the power on purpose. Maybe some chakz had damaged the grid by falling into a power station and incinerating themselves?

  You’d think two zombies in a Tesla would attract attention, but the guard was so busy, as long as the car kept moving, Nell and I passed. With no flatulent limo driver trying to skirt the trouble, we also had a tour of the uprising dead.

  There wasn’t a civilian LB in sight, most having locked themselves in their homes. There were plenty of chakz though, moving about the fires and broken windows. Some were feral, some were just pissed, and it wasn’t always easy to tell which was which.

  The bulk of the “revolution” was a moveable feast. Trying to herd the restless departed, the guard cordoned off a street here and opened one there. Simple strategy. Once they had enough chakz in a concentrated area, they could open up with maximum firepower and minimal property damage.

  Without realizing it, the ferals cooperated, gnashing their teeth as they shambled along the path of least resistance. The smart ones were the troublemakers, understanding the plan and doing their best to thwart it. They tried to steer the ferals themselves, using everything from hot-w
ired cars to two-by-fours to veer them any place but where the livebloods wanted them to go. When they had the numbers, they slammed through roadblocks. When they didn’t, they rushed through the buildings and came out the other side.

  I wanted to root for them, but didn’t see a good end coming. The whole thing was ridiculously hopeless and stupid. But maybe that was the point. Dad was never much of a reader, but whenever Mom asked what he was so pissed about “this time,” there was a Dylan Thomas poem he’d quote, though you have to swap “chakz” for “old age” to really make it work:

  Do not go gentle into that good night,

  Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

  Rage, rage against the dying of light.

  And, after all, I had my own ridiculously hopeless and stupid plan.

  The first we saw of the plaza was the scaffolding surrounding the memorial Mayor Kagan had commissioned at the site of the last riot. I’d seen mock-ups of it: a brave police officer with a flamethrower, three citizens—man, woman, and child—cowering behind him as he squirted bronzed flames at a leaping bronze corpse.

  Past that lay the ruins of a medical center, where Nell and I had our first date as captives of a psychopath. No memorial there, just a pile of hazardous cement, a buried lunatic, and the heads of his victims. If I was headed into a reverie, Nell pulled me out by shaking my shoulder and directing me onto Centre Street.

  We headed toward the studio, a five-story brick building. When I pulled up to its underground parking lot, the electronic gate recognized a transponder on Green’s car. The place still had power. I drove in and parked in his spot next to the elevator.

  I turned to my celebrity pal. “What’re we going to find up there?”

  “They have to be covering the riots. Nick, the director, was real unhappy when Green pulled me away. I can probably take over for whoever they’ve got subbing. If I get that far, what am I supposed to say exactly?”

  “Uh…” In the glove compartment I found a pen but no paper. Improvising, I pulled out the registration and scribbled on the back. “I’ll give you the bullet points.”